1. Technical Field
The invention is related to interactive virtual team worksites, and more particularly to a system and process for providing an interactive computer network-based virtual team worksite that combines data storage, team members' presence information, interaction tools and a past history log into one virtual complex. In addition, an event-based system and process for recording and playback of collaborative electronic presentations is provided, which can be employed in conjunction with the virtual team worksite.
2. Background Art
A lot of large companies are global, and even smaller companies have people working on the same project but at different locations and/or times. Interaction between these distributed team members is much lower than co-located teams because of communication barriers, which in turn may affect the productivity of the whole team. Specifically, three problems with today's computer-based networks prevent information workers' distributed collaboration from being more effective. First, “unintended interactions” (i.e., ad hoc interactions rising from people's serendipitous meetings) are reduced because of lack of real-time presence information and convenient light-weight interaction tools. Second, the transition between the three modes of working—“working alone”, “ad hoc meeting” and “scheduled meeting”—is not smooth and convenient because of the transition overhead and communication barriers between teammates. Third, the key elements essential to a project's life cycle—data, people and interactions tools—are separated.
In regard to the aforementioned presence information (i.e., what other members are doing and how they are doing it), this is crucial in collaboration, especially because it is the foundation for unintended interactions. However, most existing distributed collaboration systems provide presence information that is too vague and not very useful. For example, one popular tool for on-line collaboration used by distributed team members is instant messenger (IM). Unfortunately, current IM systems only indicate whether a team member is away or online, which still needs to be set manually instead of detected automatically. However, a person who is online, but not working on the team project at the moment, may not want to be bothered (e.g., invited to a team discussion). Thus, there is a need for project/team-specific presence information to be made available.
In regard to the aforementioned transition between the three modes of working, presence information has been found to cause a “dual tradeoff” problem: the more presence information a user reveals to others, the more awareness others have about him, and the less privacy he has; also, the more presence information a user retrieves about others, the more awareness he has about others, and the more disturbance he gets from such information. Thus, presence information should be made available only when the user can dedicate time to the team project.
In addition to the foregoing problems with distributed collaborations, it is also noted that existing presentation and conferencing systems rely on video-based recording: namely what a user sees on his/her monitor in an interaction session is recorded as a video file. There are several problems with this approach. First, it consumes very large amounts of storage space if a team wants to record all the sessions for the life-cycle of a project. Second, because today's video analysis techniques are still not mature, it becomes very hard to search through the documentary videos for specific information, or summarize a long session into short highlights of key points. Third, the recorded video can only be watched. Its content cannot be easily edited or modified by a user later on.